Deciding to Do It

Episode #9 of the course Negotiation skills by Chris Croft

 

Now that you know how to negotiate, the important thing is to give it a go.

The most common reason we don’t negotiate a great deal is that we don’t even try!

If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and if you DO ask, you quite often get.

Sometimes, you’ll get amazing deals just by asking, and it makes me wonder how many other deals I could have gotten if I’d tried.

We often don’t even try to negotiate, for a number of reasons:

• not in our national culture

• fear of upsetting the other person

• don’t have time

• can already afford it / already a bargain

• fear of failing—looking humiliated if we don’t get a good deal

• fear of looking cheap

• fear of not getting the deal at all—and we NEED that item!

What’s YOUR favorite excuse?

But if you analyze them, all those reasons are false!

• “not in our national culture”—But you can choose to do what you like. And if we negotiate for houses and cars, then why not for a suit or a dress or a table or a holiday?

• fear of upsetting the other person—They will be more upset if you don’t! They’ll be thinking they should have asked for more. And anyway, providing you’re polite and blame it on yourself, it’s their problem if they are upset.

• “don’t have time”—It’s worth making sure that you do have time. If you are about to get $1,000 off the price of a car, that’s worth 10 minutes of your time, isn’t it? It’s even worth an hour!

• “can already afford it / already a bargain”—But you still might get more off if you try.

• fear of failing—looking humiliated if we don’t get a good deal—Now we come to the real reasons, these last three. The answer to this one and the next one is as follows …

• fear of looking cheap—Think of it as a game. It’s not personal; you know you could afford to buy it at full price, you just don’t want to pay that much. So, it’s a game: Imagine that you’re going to go into that BMW showroom and mess with the salesperson’s head, so why not have a bit of fun? Observe yourself playing the game, think about how you could have played it even better next time, and be detached from your personal pride.

• fear of not getting the deal at all—and we NEED that item! This is an interesting one. Can negotiating cause you to fail to get a deal? No! Not if you are polite (so they don’t throw you out) and not if you are prepared to crumble (so you don’t walk out). Crumbling means that you are prepared, if you must, to say, “Oh, all right then, I’ll pay your full price. It’s a lot to spend, but what the hell, I’m going to do it.” Imagine if you got a bargain half the time, and the other half you had to crumble and pay the full price: You would still have got a great deal half of the time and not lost anything the other half. So, be prepared to crumble, and then you’ve got nothing to lose by asking for a bargain.

That is Lesson 9 of 10—you can’t lose the deal by negotiating, you have nothing to lose by trying, it’s just a game—so always give it a go!

I’ll see you tomorrow for my last lesson, which will help you put it all into practice.

Bye for now!

CC

 

Recommended book

Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations by William Ury

 

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